6 Free WordPress Plugins to Speed Up Your Site

In today’s online world, speed is of the utmost importance. With more and more users using mobile devices to access the World Wide Web, the tolerance for long load times is all but gone. In fact, 64% of smartphone users expect pages to load in less than 4 seconds.

Every second that your loading time increases, your conversions decrease. Luckily, WordPress offers several plugins you can use to keep your website loading fast for your users. Today I’m going to show you my six favorite plugins for this purpose.

6 Plugins Guaranteed to Speed Up Your WordPress Site

The speed of your website is affected by a lot of different factors, but ultimately, when you start a WordPress blog, you need to constantly monitor your loading times. If you start by downloading these crucial plugins, you’ll be able to combat any slowdown as time goes on.

Let’s find out which ones should be on your list:

1. W3 Total Cache

Our first contender is by far the best caching plugin WordPress has to offer. The reason that this plugin is so crucial has to do with how content is delivered to web users. When someone goes to your website, they are requesting those specific files from the hosting server you use.

This can be a time-consuming effort based on a lot of factors, but a plugin like W3 Total Cache improves these speeds by caching the information and making it more readily available for users, regardless of their location.

The plugin can be configured as needed, but if you’re a beginner you’ll notice immediate results by simply installing it and never touching it again.

2. BJ Lazy Load

Trying to load all of your images at once on a given page is a guaranteed way to slow things down. BJ Lazy Load increases your loading speeds by only loading pictures that your users are currently looking at.

As they scroll down the page, the new images load it organically, thus saving time and bandwidth by only loading what’s needed. The plugin is also compatible with iframes so it will do the same effect for embedded videos sourced from YouTube, Vimeo, and other platforms.

3. WP-Smush.It

Images can pack a punch when it comes to their file size. The ideal way to deal with this issue is to compress the images and reduce their size. The smaller the file size, the faster it will load for your users.

Wp-Smush.It works by automatically compressing images as you upload them to WordPress. The process happens quickly in the background, saving you the time of having to manually compress them yourself. The process is also optimized to reduce any loss of quality after the compression. You get the same quality, but in a smaller file size.

4. WP-Optimize

This plugin works behind the scenes to clean up your database and ultimately make things run smoother as a result. Instead of doing this process manually with PhpMyAdmin to clean your database tables, the process is done automatically.

WP-Optimize goes through your spam comments, deleted posts, and other unneeded storage items and clears them out to increase your website’s performance. The plugin also supports a weekly scheduling option so you don’t have to do this process manually.

5. Revision Control

Did you know that every time you save your draft in WordPress, you’re creating a new version of the post? All of those revisions stay in your database long after you’ve clicked the “publish” button. With the Revision Control plugin, you can control how many of these revisions WordPress saves at a time.

By keeping it low, 2-3 revisions, you have a backup if you need it, but you’re not bogging down your site by keeping drafts you don’t need anymore.

6. WP Super Minify

Our final plugin does more work behind the scenes to ensure that your user experience and speed is up to par. By using Minify PHP Framework, the plugin is able to optimize and cache your JavaScript and CSS files.

Doing this increases your page speed and ultimately results in a better ranking on Google PageSpeed Insights and better optimization overall. WP Super Minify is easy to use as well. You simply install and activate it. The plugin will do the rest.

Final Thoughts

WordPress website speed is a crucial factor in your ongoing success. By installing these plugins, you can ensure that your website is running at the optimal speed. How do you keep your website loading speed in check? Let us know in the comments!

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